


Expect to Be Scratched

by dome_epais



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M, a cat adopts Winters, and he names it Nix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-23 11:09:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/925673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dome_epais/pseuds/dome_epais
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winters adopts a cat after the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expect to Be Scratched

**Author's Note:**

> Title from: _Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched_ \-- Miguel de Cervantes

The cat bolts inside Winters’ kitchen during a thunderstorm, half-drowned and shaking, and then spends forty minutes huddled in a miserable hypothermic ball behind his cabinets.

Winters eventually coaxes it out with milk and some pieces of meat, and then gets it with a towel by surprise. After a good rubbing, it turns out that the cat is almost solid black, with white patches above its eyes and three white socks.

It doesn’t look pleased with him, despite the way its shaking is slowing as it - Winters checks - as hewarms up, cradled to Winters’ chest with its paws trapped in the towel.

"Don’t worry. We’ll wait for the storm to pass, and find out where you came from," Winters tells the skinny little thing.

It bites his hand, two neat punctures on each side, and then races off to hide under his bed while Winters cleans and dresses the wound.

—

"I’m so sorry," Mrs. Marshall says, looking harried. "It’s just our barn cat got herself a litter and we didn’t know till she came out of hiding with all seven of them."

"Sounds like a handful," Winters commiserates. The cat is trying to wrestle its way out of the new towel Winters wrapped it in, after getting a few neat parallel claw marks to the wrist. Winters shifts his hold to keep the cat from backing straight out into an encounter with gravity.

Mrs. Marshall eyes him with a glimmer of hope. “I don’t suppose… we  _are_  looking for homes for all of them. Could you do with a cat, Major?”

Winters tells her, “You can just call me Richard, ma’am,” and then there’s a new glimmer in her eye, and he finds himself taking tea with her single daughter and still holding the cat on the way home.

—

He sets the cat down inside, and it immediately turns around and heads out the open door. It’s out of sight before Winters can get to the porch again.

He shakes his head and figures that’s that; the cat will fend for itself or become someone else’s problem.

He makes dinner for himself, and sits down with a book that Harry Welsh recommended in a letter; this Fitzgerald guy apparently knew something about the world, twenty years ago. Then he listens to the radio and sits on his porch to watch the sun go down.

The cat mews as it slinks back up the porch steps, looking like it meant to come back, anyway. Winters lets it inside and gets some more milk and meat, and resolves to find some proper cat food at the store.

—

Winters goes to the store at blinks at the different packages, with little cartoons of cats presumably enjoying the food inside. He picks up a plain brown bag.

He doesn’t need to pass by the hard alcohol on the way out, but he finds a particular bottle of whiskey in his hand as he leaves, anyway.

—

He ends up calling the cat Nix.

It’s an accident of nostalgia; one moment he’s thinking of what Nixon must be getting up to these past few months, and the next, the cat is perched on his thigh with his backside to him, demanding attention without acknowledgement.

Winters tells the cat, “Oh, sure, and everything on your schedule, too.” And then the cat is just Nix in his mind.

—

He doesn’t call the cat by its name at first, out of some vague desire not to admit it to the little thing. Winters spends a lot of time telling the world that he does not dwell on the war, or the friendships he made there.

It’s not as though the cat can read the return addresses on the letters he receives, though.

So it’s only two weeks into their strange armistice before he scolds the cat, “Nix, no, that’s my drink. That’s not for you.”

Nix looks up from lapping at the lukewarm tea, seems unimpressed, and goes back to the cup.

“And you’re not supposed to be on the table,” Winters admonishes, picking Nix up by his black soft stomach and sending him back to the floor.

He finds the cat curled up asleep on his place mat an hour later and refuses to laugh, even internally.

—

Nixon sends a letter one week in advance of his visit. Winters sets the message down and looks at Nix on the other side of the table. He tells the cat, “We’ll have to get ready.”

After a moment of consideration, he adds, “And you can’t bite him.”

—

Nixon blows in during late spring. “Everything’s  _wet_ ,” he complains, dragging in a small bag and a grimace. “You really couldn’t have picked me up?”

“Sorry. I don’t have a car,” Winters explains. “Can I get your bag? The guest room is through this way.”

Nixon sighs and grudgingly lets Winters take the bag. Then he asks, “Please,  _please_  tell me you do not run a dry house around here.”

“I picked up some Vat 69 just for you,” Winters promises.

—

“So…” Nixon asks a while later, glaring suspiciously at the bowl in the corner of the kitchen. “Is that… you have a dog?”

Winters looks around, distracted, and says, “Oh. No. Stray cat wandered by and decided to stay.”

Nixon frowns. “I’m not exactly a cat person.”

“Ehh. I think you’ll like him,” Winters says with a smile.

—

Nix the cat decides to sit on Nixon the person’s chest during the night, and that’s how they find out that, beyond not being a cat person, Nixon is outright allergic to cats.

He’s still sneezing by lunchtime and grousing about ‘that damn unlucky black monster’ and wiping at his running nose.

Winters just serves him as much stew as he’ll take and doesn’t argue about it. It’s not as though he brought the cat into his house on purpose.

—

“Look at this. It’s a wasteland,” Nixon huffs, looking out at the waving waist-high grass. Winters has a little garden growing that should be enough to feed him, but he hasn’t done much with the rest of his land. It’ll be summer soon, and all of that grass will dry out and become a fire hazard.

Winters tells him, “You’re the one that came out for a visit.”

Nixon tilts his tumbler so that the last of his drink climbs the walls. He shrugs and says, “Needed a break.”

“Well,” Winters sighs and sips at his iced tea, “you don’t need to worry about much out here.” He doesn’t ask how long a break Nixon needs.

—

Winters finds the cat on the table again and just says, “Nix, no. Get down from there.”

The cat doesn’t budge until he raps his knuckles on the wood, and then it grudgingly bounds away. Winters nods, satisfied, and gets out the eggs before he hears a sneeze in the doorway.

“Tell me,” Nixon starts, and sneezes again. He looks like death warmed over, and like he wished he'd been left to freeze. “Tell me you did  _not_  name that thing after me.”

“Of course not.” Winters cracks an egg into the pan and smirks to himself. “Named him after Nixon, New Jersey, obviously.”

—

Over dinner, Nixon wipes his mouth, chews thoughtfully, swallows, and then asks, “So. Nixon, New Jersey, huh?”

“Yup,” Winters says, and waits.

Nixon used to do this all the time, picking up a conversation whole days after it started. It passed the time when they were stuck in foxholes, and it gave them both a chance to think out their sides of the discussion.

Nixon glances over, and away. “Been on your mind lately?”

Winters blinks at him, and says, “With everything around here to tempt me?”

Nixon blinks back at him, in just the same way, and empties his glass.

—

Winters sits on his porch, reading the last of Welsh’s book and absently burying his fingers in the cat’s fur, when Nixon comes out.

The heavy wooden thumps pause at Winters’ elbow and he waits a few seconds to ask, “What’s on your mind, Lew?”

Nixon sits in the opposite chair, purchased just for his visit, and says, “So I want to tell you to come and stay with me. In this big dumb house. In Nixon, New Jersey.”

Winters squints over at him. “But you’re not going to?”

“Not with that cat around,” Nixon says, nodding at the thing. “Are you kidding? Those things live for years. I’d be miserable.”

“I don’t even like it,” Winters argues, scratching in front of the cat’s ears, and under its chin.

Nixon’s mouth curls. “Who are you kidding? You couldn’t stand to give it away. You don’t remember what you were like right after Sink took Easy, but I do, and no thank you to seeing it again.”

The cat nibbles at Winters’ fingers a little, and then chomps down.

Winters sighs and shakes his hand out while the cat darts away, and then sucks at the welling blood. “Still think I can’t stand to be parted?” he asks Nixon drolly.

Nixon smirks at him, lopsided.

—

“Maybe you could keep it locked in your room,” Nixon hypothesizes the next day. They haven’t seen Nix the cat today, and Nixon is taking blissfully deep breaths out of something like spite.

Winters points out, “He’s an outdoor cat. He refuses to stay inside.” After a moment, he adds, “Unless it’s storming. He doesn’t like that.”

Nixon lifts his sunglasses up to glare at him. “Are you honestly telling me that your only objection to coming back to New Jersey with me is that cat’s quality of life?”

Winters shrugs. “I don’t care about the cat,” he lies, and smiles.

—

Nixon tries, “Who gave you the cat? Can’t you send it back?”

“Mrs. Marshall down the road.” Winters shakes his head and says, “You don’t want to try and give it back.”

“How bad can she be?” Nixon scoffs, and walks off.

Winters starts a new book and settles in with Nix the cat as he waits for Nixon the person to come back.

Nixon shows up five hours later and just says, “So. Her daughter’s quite the conversationalist.”

Winters laughs in his face.

—

The worst part is that Nix the cat seems to genuinely like Nixon the human.

Winters hears a long series of sneezes as he’s making breakfast, and then the cat trots past him looking pleased, and then Nixon stumbles in sounding like he’s dying.

“Dat cat’s oud to ged be,” Nixon accuses, stuffy and red-eyed.

“Maybe he just thinks you’re new and interesting,” Winters suggests.

Nixon sneezes again, resentfully.

—

There are some things that Winters knows about Nixon’s visit. Like that he came with the sole purpose of convincing Winters to move back home with him, and that Winters is perfectly willing to be convinced, if it weren’t for this cat dilemma.

Winters just isn’t sure why Nixon insists on facing off with the cat, like that will solve the problem of his hating it.

“Lew…” Winters starts on a sigh.

“Ssh. I’ve nearly won this time,” Nixon scolds him.

Winters shakes his head. “I don’t think he knows what a staring contest is.”

The cat blinks and Nixon celebrates anyway.

—

Nixon finally just corners Winters and says, “Look. If I really…  _really_  avoid the cat, will you just come home with me?”

“I was starting to think you’d never ask,” Winters says, pretty amused.

“I’m asking now,” Nixon says, glaring. “And you’d better say yes. I won’t have the last two weeks with the hell-beast be for nothing, Dick.”

Winters laughs at him again. And then he says, “Yes, yes, Lew, you idiot.”

The cat jumps off of the couch with a thud and prowls past them. Nixon glares after it and says, “Okay, but you’re in charge of packing that thing up.”

Winters gets his fingers around the back of Nixon’s neck, below his ear and at his pulse, and tells him, “Don’t worry about the cat, Lew.”

Then Nixon kisses him, and that settles that. 


End file.
